Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey
by T.J. Lauren
Summary: "Everyone's memory is a mess. Life is a mess. Time is being rewritten all around us, every day." Amy was not the only one affected by the universe being rebooted. Includes heavy use of circular logic and paradox exacerbation. 5x13 "The Big Bang" insert


**Warnings/Rating:** PG for headache-inducing thought processes. Major spoilers through Let's Kill Hitler, and conceptual spoilers for the Series 6 minisode Good Night.

**Disclaimer:** Doctor Who and all characters therein © Newman, Webber, Wilson, Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffat & everyone else at the BBC. Some pieces of dialogue were taken from the show.

**Author's Note:** I adore the Pandorica episodes… they are as enjoyable as they are full of plot holes. I'm not sure if Moffat forgot, missed, or just chose to ignore the Turn Left universe, which made it implicitly clear what an enormous impact the Doctor makes everywhere he goes. Let's face it, Amy and Rory aren't the only one's whose lives would have been totally rearranged by the Doctor being erased from time. He has shaped the entire Whoniverse, and not just because he's the title character. Since Amy's parents are around, we can see that the original universe did not simply snap back into place just because the Doctor did.

This contains a large amount of circular logic and paradox exacerbation and explication. I'm not sure how much sense it makes, but here you go!

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><p>The twenty-sixth of June, 2010 CE Earth-time was a particularly peculiar and special day for everyone within the known universe. At this precise moment, Amelia Jessica Pond saved the universe from imploding upon itself.<p>

In a different world, Amelia Jessica Pond grew up with a crack in her wall, and ran away with her imaginary friend in his mad blue box.

In this world, that crack never existed. The imaginary friend and his magic box remained just that - imaginary. And without the not-so-imaginary friend, the caretaker, the last of the Time Lords, there to stabilize it, the universe is shattering, fraying and falling apart. The world was chaos incarnate and only held together by the eye of the storm: Little Amelia Jessica Pond, on little planet Earth, on the 26th of June, 2010 CE Earth-time.

While it waited linearly for that moment to occur and bind the rest of the fraying threads together into a properly tangled knot of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, a fair number of things occurred without occurring, existed without existing.

Humans and Trions and Trakenites and young Time Ladies live on oblivious, shackled to average or dull or even painful lives, and some of them look at the stars and wonder, while others never realize what is missing in that empty place in their hearts, their minds, their memories. They never did, but would eventually, and always had, know(n) what kept their universe from collapsing in on itself.

Good People and bad people both continued on, unaided and suffering, while others, good and bad, lived on and flourished. Worlds were never saved, cruel people never stopped, mistakes were never made, injustices never set right. Children who had died in the other world lived in this one, and ones who lived in the other, died here.

In this world, time should be ending, the Final Sanction of the Time Lords fully realized, the universe ending and the people of Gallifrey called to a higher plane. But it would not, so it could not, so it did not, even though there was nothing to stop it…yet. There would be someday, and had been in the past because of that someday.

Earth was destroyed, ravaged by alien attack and by it's own inhabitants struggle to survive. But the planet remained untouched, because it had to. Because to rebalance time and the universe, to stabilize reality, Earth had to first be stable, and it was, because it did.

Aborted and renewed and skewed time streams became layered and clashed with each other and conflicted themselves, and _"We all wake up where we should be; we don't remember it and none of this ever happened."_ was never so explosive and vague a sentence because it was never uttered because River Song never existed because Melody Williams was to be born in nine months time after this most remarkable date, would live a happy, normal life in her happy, normal geography teacher career.

Except River Song did exist, and she passed by a window at an event on the 26th of June, 2010 CE Earth-time that she should not be alive yet to see, because she hadn't even been conceived yet and could not in the future of that present.

Yet she existed still, and with a little nudging from her, Amelia Jessica Pond, no ordinary girl, remembered back into existence the very stabilizing point of existence.

And all over Earth - all over the universe - lives blinked out, lives blinked in, and Humans and Trions and Trakenites and young Time Ladies all felt the shock of their lives when that empty gap was suddenly filled.

Old memories that never existed reawakened. In 18th century Scotland, a Highlander staggered under the weight of it. On a space station in the 21st century, a young astrophysicist did the same. In Chiswick, in 2010, Donna Noble screamed. The memories quickly swallowed themselves, canceled out by their own existence, but the pain of their brief flare of existence lingered long after they had disappeared again.

In Gallifreyan history, a whole bloodline flickered into existence, children who had not, should have, and always had been born reappeared into the universe, and burned with the rest of their brethren, safely out of the way of the rest of the universe behind a Time Lock that existed even though it shouldn't because it's maker never had. Except now he did, and therefore had.

Jack the Fact, the Living Fixed Point… without the Stabilizing Point, there had been no Bad Wolf. Without the Bad Wolf, Jack was never fixed in time. But because he was fixed in time, it was impossible for him not to exist. And even though he had never stopped existing, he jerked and choked, like he had every time something tried to wipe him out of time, and came back to life again as he (the world?) stabilized.

Very near the epicenter of this temporal shock wave, a very young, not-yet-River Song collapsed to her knees from vertigo. Her fingers scraped bloody against the sidewalk as she grasped for purchase. Mels is cemented into being again, her personal timeline sustainable now.

In a parallel dimension, four lives felt the echoes across the void, rippling back into existence. Technically, being part of a different universe altogether, Jackie, Rose, and Tony Tyler never stopped existing. But in the world without the crack, the elder two had never left their home dimension, and Tony is never born at all, and they all feel the shuddering ghost pains of snapping back into place.

The Human-Time Lord Metacrisis burst back into existence like a drowning man resuscitated, gasping and shaking and clinging to Rose with the shock of have stopped being for an age, or an instant, or no time at all. He, too, was part of a universe completely separate from the one that stopped existing. But he, more than the three Tylers, could not really exist until that specific exact moment in time when the universe stopped merely pretending to exist and just _did_.

And even as the pieces everywhere shuffled and shifted and blended Worlds One and Two, the stabilizing point, the axis of the paradox, the madman and his box, materialized in the middle of Amelia Jessica Pond's wedding reception. And the madman stuck his head out the door of his little blue box and smiled at the bride. _"Uh, yeah. Completely astonished. Never expected that."_

And the universe was a mess, but the good kind of mess, that didn't collapse even though it was complex and nonlinear and multilayered. Things happened for reasons that had never occurred. Sometimes people remembered, and were confused, because it couldn't possibly have happened like that. But it did, and it does, and it will do, and that's fine. Their memories are _fine_, because the past is really like that.

Time can be rewritten. People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff. Or so it's caretaker likes to say. He would know, since he is simultaneously the cause and the result of most of it.


End file.
